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Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Comics Rant: Detective Comics #578

This is it! The big finale to Batman Year Two. And about time too. I wanted to move on to talking thrash about Chris Claremont and John Byrnes X-Men, But anyway this issue is brought to us by Mike W. Barr and Todd McFarlane. Surprise, McFarlane is doing the inks himself. Boy is it bad. I mean he was never that great of an inker but here you can really tell that he hasn’t found that style that would be associated with him for the rest of his carrer. Also, Bruce Wayne looks like Peter Parker here and Batman looks like Spawn. You know, where the cape covers the whole body as if Batman is nothing but a shape. This is where Todd tells you some bullshit about how you fear the shape. Uhmmm, sure Todd, we’ll be frightened.

So all the Mafia bosses are pissed that Joe Chill didn’t take out the Reaper. Tough shit. The cops crash the Mafia party along with the Reaper. Jim Gordon and his cops get a tip (Also from the Reaper.) and show up where the Mafia is. A big fight breaks out and then of course Batman shows up. But not before Bruce Wayne asks Rachel to marry him. But Bruce wants to fight and stop the mob, Joe Chill and the Reaper before he can hang up his cape and cowl. Clearly a tall order.

Batman wants in on the fight, so in order to get inside Bats steals a police truck and rams it into the building where the fight is raging on. I amused by the fact of Todd McFarlane drawing Batman laughing while driving a big blue police truck. Funny stuff. Reaper kills the mob guys because you know, that pretty much what he does. It’s on his resume. Yup. So the cops along with Jim Gordon get away pretty much without casualties and Batman takes Joe Chill to crime alley to revel that he’s Bruce Wayne and also doing away with that whole “Secret Idneity” thing that Bruce had going on. World’s greatest detective? More like World’s dumbest. (Got nothing.)

So before Batman can pull the trigger the Reaper shoots Joe Chill. Reaper also knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. See, like I said, world’s dumbest detective. Wait, I forgot this is only his second year on the job. So I guess this could all be over looked (Sarcasm.) Reaper and Batman fight to the top of the new Wayne Tower that’s being built in the middle of downtown Gotham. After what I think Todd McFarlane meant as a kung fu battle Batman gets the upper hand and then the Reaper tell Batman he’s got the Juice now, or maybe he just tells him that he has the Reaper and Rachel’s father’s seal of approval because he IS Rachel’s father!!!!

Bruce is ready to call it quits and go to a perfect life with Rachel. But when it comes to light that Rachel’s dad is the Reaper, she decides to leave Bruce and go back to being a nun. Bruce is all bummed out as most people would be. So he’s all like “Screw it! Back to fighting crime for me.” Batman buries the gun that killed his family at the site of the Thomas Wayne Memorial which makes sense to Bruce. This was a nice ending for the story. Mike W. Barr is a pretty good writer and handled the tale very well. I got no problems on that end. But the art would have been better served if Alan Davis stayed on the title. McFarlane also needed to stick with an inker cause that this point Todd left lots to be desired. Good effort, but the finale of a big story like this should not have been a place to try out Todd’s inks here. But it was a fun read.